Obama team exercises Hill power

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood met with Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.), discussed some long-delayed bridges in Hill’s district and agreed to travel to Kentucky to meet with local officials about the span over the Ohio River.

Story Continued Below

Except that when Hill and LaHood met a few weeks ago, there was nary a staffer, necktie or notepad in sight. Hill took the opportunity to corner LaHood after the two worked out on treadmills in the House gym.

“The one thing I can do is fill potholes,” joked LaHood, who is back in his old Rayburn stomping grounds three mornings a week for anywhere from 40 to 60 minutes on the treadmill. “So some of the guys talk to me about projects in their districts. If they didn’t, I’d wonder about them.”

For all the attention paid to see-and-be-seen lunch and dinner spots, there is perhaps no more intimate place in the capital (and the Capitol) where work and play mix among the powerful than behind the locked, unmarked and utterly unremarkable doors of SB-322 in the Rayburn House Office Building sub-basement.

The House gym — or Members’ Wellness Center, as the on-duty attendant calls it upon picking up the phone — offers a sanctuary for any current or former member of that chamber to escape staffers, constituents and reporters.

But the gym, along with its Senate counterpart across the Capitol, has offered something else in the Obama era: a target of opportunity.

As past members of the House, LaHood and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel exercise their gym privileges a few times each week. And as a former senator, Vice President Joe Biden occasionally returns to work out with his old colleagues in the Russell Senate Office Building.

In doing so, they are able to pick up valuable intelligence and discuss legislation in an informal setting that lends itself to easy dialogue.

“People are more frank when they’re wearing their gym clothes,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), for years a House gym regular who finally, 10 years after being elected to the Senate, made the switch to the facility in his own chamber.

For members, the access to such top officials is just as invaluable — giving them a chance to emphasize, in person, the importance of issues that may determine their electoral fate.

Recalling this past Tuesday morning, LaHood said he talked to about a half-dozen members in between his cardio and time in the locker room.

A former co-chairman of the informal committee that oversees the gym, and a popular pragmatist in his House days, LaHood lauded the space as “one of the most bipartisan places in the whole Capitol.”

Which is not to say that politics stop entirely on the treadmill, on the court or in the sauna.

Emanuel, like LaHood a former House member from Illinois, is there on the three mornings each week he’s not swimming.

He keeps going to stay in touch with former colleagues, an aide said, and to find out what they want from the White House.

But he’s not just listening.

In the weeks before the credit card reform bill passed the Congress, Emanuel and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) had a constant, running dialogue about the legislation she was sponsoring in between time on the stationary bike (Emanuel) and tae kwon do (Maloney).

“Whenever I saw him down there, we’d touch base on the votes I had and what next steps we needed to take to get the bill passed,” said Maloney, who said the two had between seven and 10 conversations on the legislation in recent weeks.

The bill, which Obama is slated to sign at the White House on Friday, most likely would have passed without the sweaty strategy sessions, Maloney said. But her face-to-face contact with Emanuel “certainly made things move easier.”

“You can actually get a lot of work done in the gym in the morning,” she said.

Emanuel is effectively just picking up where he left off before heading down Pennsylvania Avenue.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Democrats’ return to power in Congress in 2006 began in the House gym.